


but nobody's keeping score anymore

by sonatine



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (that's not a euphemism), M/M, aziraphale talks to a lot of snakes, no body switching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 13:50:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19335811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/pseuds/sonatine
Summary: And so here Crowley is, squared off with the most dangerous adversary he’s faced in a baker’s dozen of centuries: a claw-foot bathtub.





	but nobody's keeping score anymore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mostly_empty_space](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mostly_empty_space/gifts).



The first time is an accident.

There’s a cannonball heading straight for Crowley’s head and Aziraphale quite loses his. All he sees is Death hurtling toward his companion, and he throws out his hand without thought. The soldier crumples to the ground.

“You could’ve just disappeared him,” Crowley says.

But no, he couldn’t have. Aziraphale, at his most subconscious level, made the ordinary foot soldier’s death seem natural. Like an accident. He was _covering his tracks._

“Clever, that.” Crowley is openly amused, sprawled on the hill above in long-limbed glory. King Richard’s cross on his tunic is ripped halfway. It may have been Aziraphale’s curved scimitar that did the damage. “But _this_ you’re not sorry for?”

Death has stopped to inspect a nice stone. They scoop up the soldier and toss the rock to Aziraphale, who pockets it rather reluctantly.

“We’re meant to be enemies,” he protests. “Maiming you is part of my performance report.”

Crowley sends another wave of crusaders charging toward Antioch. Only a sadist would launch a campaign midday without breaking for lunch. “Speaking of, a little birdie told me you’re being transferred to the fair Isles too.”

Aziraphale spears a Christian through the heart. “Never.”

“You’ll get used to it. Reckon you’d even like the local craic.”

Someone serves Aziraphale mealy porridge on his first night in Hastings castle. He writes a strongly worded letter to the opposition. He writes it in poison oak.

The second time is not an accident. Someone insults Aziraphale’s second-favorite traveling minstrel and he feels a white hot rage. It’s not until a year later that he learns Crowley quietly cured the woman’s smallpox. “You undid my evil deed!”

“You undo mine all the time,” Crowley points out.

“That’s different!”

“Is it? Looks the same on paper upstairs.”

_You can’t kill kids_ , Crowley’s reproachful words echo in his head. Still some three thousand years later Aziraphale feels outrage. Who is a mere angel to question the Almighty’s mad plans? Who is a mere _demon_ to question anything at all pertaining to heaven? Nevermind that Aziraphale agrees. Nevermind that Aziraphale sees snake-slit eyes everywhere, especially when in the throes of crises. Once he’d carried on a heartfelt conversation with a thin black garden snake round the back of the Brighton pavilion, wherein Crowley had slithered away dismissively mid-confession. For shame, Aziraphale couldn’t bring himself to reference the incident for a good decade.

“When did I ignore you?” Crowley hisses indignantly, steering Aziraphale and his patent shoes out of harm’s way. “When have I _ever_ , much as I wanted to, even interrupted your sycophantic blithering?” He lets Aziraphale tread in the next pile of dog droppings without a warning.

So it really had been just a garden snake. Aziraphale treats himself to a thimbleful of absinthe that night, God rest Henri-Louis’ soul, while licking his wounds. It never occurred to him that Crowley had feelings to hurt. But the following three-month stretch of the silent treatment rather suggested he did. Aziraphale takes up chatting with Crowley’s brethren. They sometimes slide their gaze up to stare at him balefully, but generally they scuttle away before he reaches his main point. Aziraphale tries not to take it to heart.

“He was right, you know.” Aziraphale moves a foot aside so that the snake can curl under the bench. It’s always raining in this country. But Aziraphale is used to it now. It’s the longest he’s lived anywhere, aside from Macedonia. Only sometimes now does he miss his villa by the sea. “The brigand _was_ targeting known assailants to steal from. And pawning off their gold to feed — well, you’d call them ladies of the night. And it turns out the good Sheriff has some, shall we say, _unfortunate_ tastes. Oh, it’s a pickle all right.” The snake curls over his shoe, shivering. Aziraphale feels bad for the impulse to brush it off — these are the only shoes not caked in East End sewage, and cobblers are dear — but it scuttles into a lake before he can decide. “He likes swimming too, you know,” Aziraphale calls. His voice breaks. Must be coming down with a cold. “Says it’s the closest thing to flying.”

“You’re mad if you think I’ll fly that death trap,” Crowley tells Aziraphale one godforsaken morning in Gibraltar. It’s the crack of fucking dawn and not in the good way.

Aziraphale has that look on his face. The one that started appearing around the same time the Visigoths did. “You owe me.”

Crowley lets the plane wing clip the edge of a building, because Aziraphale’s right and he knows it. He finishes the mission with nothing lost and nothing gained, as their agreement demands. He gate crashes a literary salon in revenge the minute his feet are back on earth. Aziraphale’s expression is a gratifying mix of shock and horror. Though the revenge rather backfires: the host is tickled at Crowley’s suggestive remarks; and _Crowley’s_ the one who has to suffer through an evening of melodramatic recitations. He’s not sorry to slip out early on Aziraphale’s heels.

The set of Aziraphale’s back is rigid. “How did the mission go?” he asks primly. He walks like a nun, with his hands clasped across his stomach. This cheers Crowley enormously, and regales them with an exaggerated version of his exploits. Then the heavens open up, for June in England is nearly as cruel as heaven itself.

Aziraphale is unfazed by the wet. A holdover from the Garden; even there he was unbothered by squalls of God's whimsy. Perhaps God made ducks in Aziraphale's image. “Amazing creatures, these humans. In a couple centuries you’ll be able to take that thing all the way to the Alpha Centauri.”

“The what?” Crowley is dismissive in his irritation. Aziraphale saw him clutching the biplane’s edge at takeoff, though he pretended not to notice. Imagine an angel afraid of heights. Imagine falling a few light years, terrified the entire while.

“Alpha Centauri — next to the Beta Centauri? I always thought the beta herd were nicer —”

“I know what it is! I made the schematics for it. What d’you want with a place like that anyway?” He scuffs at rocks with his feet.

Defensively, Aziraphale says, “It’s lovely.”

Even behind the glasses, Aziraphale can see Crowley’s eyes slide over. His saunter elongates. “You think so? I suppose it is.”

Then Aziraphale has to go and sigh, “Despite being built for nefarious purposes,” at which point it becomes imperative for Crowley to leave.

Crowley raises his voice at Aziraphale only once. Aziraphale doesn’t cower like humans. He doesn’t fight back like angels. He straightens indignantly and says, “ _How dare you. Crowley._ ”

It’s the ‘Crowley’ tacked on the end that gets him.

Any anger from there on out is directed at his plants. Sometimes his verbal abuse is more specific than he’d care to admit. “You think you can do everything by yourself, but just admit you _need my help_ ,” he screams at a rhododendron. It shrivels immediately. He switches to perennials after that.

Sometime in the twelfth century Crowley is following Aziraphale around for no particular reason at all when a brigand jumps out from behind a wall. She’s pulled a sword before Aziraphale can do his dramatic gasp; and Crowley’s blasted her to bits before anyone knows he’s there.

Aziraphale blinks at the place the brigand used to be. Then he catches sight of Crowley’s hair and puts things together. “You’re welcome,” Crowley says, watching the emotions morph across his counterpart’s face.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Save you? Don’t mention it. Consider it an I-O-U.”

“I could’ve talked her down.” Aziraphale is staring at the patch of scorched earth. The wind picks up, humid for autumn. “I can be quite persuasive, you know.”

“Is this your way of saying thanks?”

Aziraphale whirls around, eyes blazing. “It doesn’t mean you’re _better_ , that you can kill without feeling anything,” and Crowley tries to drown himself in the sea.

It doesn’t take, obviously. But the feeling of saltwater in his lungs remains. He summons back this feeling every time he’s on the precipice. He asks himself, _Is this death necessary?_

It’s easy to see death as inevitable when it doesn’t happen to you.

He saves a man the next day. He’s rather proud of it. He treats himself to a new painting, an oil on canvas he’s been lusting after. He hears on the way home — the painting still tucked under his arm — a town crier proclaiming in great detail the many horrible crimes his newly-saved person has just gone on to commit.

Crowley burns the painting.

Beelzebub calls him up with congratulations for destroying a priceless work of art and, as a byproduct, the life of its creator. Nothing is fair.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, stopping short. He’s using his soft disappointed voice: the one that Crowley last heard after he coined the phrase ‘the rat race.’ In the courtyard below, in a manor that used to be a not-convent, rapid-fire gunshots and screams echo. “They’re _murdering_ each other.” And then, barely a minute later, his eyes are shining. “Where’s the fun in that?” Crowley explains flippantly, smelling saltwater. And something else. Aziraphale’s new cologne really _is_ something else. It’s putting Crowley on edge. He has Aziraphale shoved up against a wall without realizing. Like kicking a puppy, he thinks savagely, watching the shadow of Aziraphale’s lashes.

He doesn’t really know. He only has an inkling. But Aziraphale had flat out refused to switch bodies, because ‘that’s another kind of magic altogether, one that shouldn’t be meddled with’ and nothing Crowley did it said could get him to budge. Crowley even offered, with the kind of persuasive tug he hadn’t drawn in since the Garden, to raise the tiny alley Thessalonian restaurant Aziraphale has been muttering about in his sleep for the last fifteen hundred years, and Aziraphale said:

“No.”

And so here Crowley is, squared off with the most dangerous adversary he’s faced in a baker’s dozen of centuries: a claw-foot bathtub.  

His coworkers jeer. Bill from accounting is leering through the two-way glass. He still owes Crowley money from lunch. How stupid.

Crowley slinks beneath the water. _It’s the closest to sleep we’ll ever have on this planet,_ Aziraphale said wistfully in the Jordan River once, blowing a raspberry up at the heavens. _That’s for you, Michael,_ he’d crowed, and Crowley’s heart had done a complicated tug.

There are gasps. Then shrieks.

Aziraphale was so sure.

Crowley’s skin fizzles. He grips the corners of the tub. Two enormous breaths strain his chest. Then the heat settles. It’s a bit like bathing in fizzy sweets. Or sulphur. Unpleasant, but not —

“Deadly,” says Gabriel calmly, with a grin wider than the Sphinx at sunset. He’s watching Aziraphale like a mob watches a hangman climb the podium; not like a polite colleague with whom he used to split breakfast danishes while waiting in the water cooler line. Aziraphale feels one of those white-hot surges, like the kind he felt before tearing apart those ovens lugnut by lugnut, and he dives into the flames.

“Remind me to replace the toner in the annex,” Gabriel says to Sandalphon, but Sandalphon is making choking noises.

Aziraphale spews brimstone. Gabriel’s cashmere wrap catches fire.

_I’ve never seen an angel do that,_ Crowley had said in a dark corner of Venice, where depravity dripped out of each doorway. _I didn’t know an angel could do that_. He’d sounded fearful. He’d looked admiring. _What are you?_

He was quite something else altogether now.

“I think,” Crowley strokes a hand through the deadly bathwater, “it would be better if we were left alone in the future.”

Michael says, “We?”

There’s a beat. “My car and I.”

And thus barely an hour later Crowley and his car are speeding back to London. It’s a fair detour from the underworld, but there’s only a brief change on the overworld underpass and then again at Hull.

It’s a curious thing these humans do: form partnerships. Fallen angels will have sporadic flares of passion, and heaven knows what angels do when they’re not kissing their own asses, but Crowley assumes it’s similar. It’s a very human thing to do, forming bonds. To _pick_ someone, selfishly. To say, stubborn and pigheaded: _I choose you._ Like they know anything. Tiny babies, all of them, an entire lifetime extinguishing before Crowley even has to mend a leather jacket.

Perhaps he has gone native.

For here he is once again in front of Aziraphale’s shop, hammering on the door like usual. Only this time it’s not the cable bill he’s panicked about.

Aziraphale wedges open the door. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Crowley’s braced in the doorjamb; his arms are all that’s keeping him upright. The bathwater may not have killed him, but it was no health drink. “We’ve got to talk.”  

“Now? We’ve only just escaped our own deaths. Terribly glad to see you alive, by the way. But I daresay we’ll have time to talk… later.” Aziraphale isn’t meeting his gaze.

“Oh really?” Crowley’s hands slide a quarter inch down. “Are we going to talk about the fact that you tried to dump me just when I needed you most? Let me in, it’s vile out here.”

“I beg your pardon, have never _dumped_ anyone.”

“‘It’s over, Crowley’?” he sneers. He can’t pretend it doesn’t smart.

“Oh, I —” Aziraphale has the good grace (ha!) to look abashed. He looks up, briefly, squinting in the sunlight. Something inside Crowley twinges. Perhaps his liver. “You tried to convince me to _swap bodies_. To go swanning into hell. Without so much as a care for my wellbeing!”

Crowley slides down further. “Angel—”

“That’s all by the by. All’s well that ends well, isn’t it? But I _do_ think it’s prudent to lay low while both sides sort out—”

Crowley does collapse then. Knees giving out, he flops onto Aziraphale. “Oh,” Aziraphale says, and brings them both to his flat above the shop. Downstairs is a charred ruin, but the living space is miraculously clear. Aziraphale eyes Crowley suspiciously.

“Wasn’t me,” he slurs. “Wasn’t even here.”

“Hm. Perhaps Adam can help fix things up.” Aziraphale has laid Crowley across the settee and swaddled him with a wool blanket. He’s sweating to death underneath, but wrapped too tightly to get free. Aziraphale clanks around the kitchen as the kettle bubbles.

“Did I look cool at least?” Crowley calls. He hears something like a snort from the kitchen.

“You know—” Aziraphale pours out two cups of Yorkshire with not nearly enough milk and far too much sugar, “I never thanked you for what you did in 1520. That winter — with the brigand who was stealing from local gentry to feed some, ah, actually very nice starving prostitutes. I yelled at you for tempting him. But it turned into a good deed in the end. I’ve never forgotten.”

“I know. I heard you the first time.”

An unfunny pun mug clatters into the sink. Aziraphale spins around. “You heard— But— Then you _were_ the garden snakes.”

“Not the first time.” Aziraphale’s gone a riotous shade of red. Crowley’s held together by spit and glue alone. “But every time after that.”

Aziraphale wails and covers his face. Crowley tries to sit up, but only manages to crick his neck. “Nothing to get excited about, angel. You’ve been spilling your guts to me for centuries.”

“Not to my knowledge!”

Crowley struggles to free himself from his wool cage. Unable to summon even a pinch of power (he’s quite drained, it seems), he throws himself into the ground and inches across the floor. Aziraphale forgets to be humiliated. “My dear Crowley, do have some self-respect!”

“Shut up and help me out of this.”

Aziraphale must be drained too, for he stoops down and unwraps Crowley by hand. The edges of his hair are singed and he smells of woodsmoke. Crowley swallows thickly. “Rather returned to your proper form, aren’t you?” Aziraphale’s using his joking voice. It’s nearly indistinguishable from his drive-thru ordering voice.

The blanket comes free. Its corners unspool around Crowley in a vast lake.

“Shut up,” he says again, pulling Aziraphale down, “and kiss me.”

It’s the crack of fucking dawn, in the good way. Crowley is warm. Not the scorching heat of heaven and hell, but the comfortable sweat of an early summer morning when the fan is still stored away. The stone Crowley always carries around with him has been gently placed on the bedside table.

A breeze picks up. Crowley turns, pulling Aziraphale with him, and gets a mouthful of feather. He opens an eye. “Ah,” he says, divining the source of the breeze. “Got your powers back, I see.”

“You planned this,” Aziraphale accuses, but he doesn’t look upset. His cheek has an uneven red mark from the pillowcase. Crowley has to close his eyes again. The regular senses are quite enough to handle at the moment.

“Maybe so, angel.” His own back aches in a way that suggests his will return soon too. “Maybe so.”

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr link](https://sonatine.tumblr.com/post/185801329759/but-nobodys-keeping-score-anymore)
> 
> [but nobody's keeping score anymore tag](https://sonatine.tumblr.com/search/but+nobody%27s+keeping+score+anymore)


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